Camp
for migratory agricultural workers of the Phillips Packing Company in
Vienna, Maryland. On the left are the living quarters and on the right
the cook houses: photo by Jack Delano, July 1940

Camp for migratory workers of the Phillips Packing Company
at Vienna, Maryland. On the left are the living quarters, in the center
the cook-houses and in the background on the right the factory: photo by Jack Delano, July 1940

Housing for migratory labor at Phillips Packing Company at Vienna, Dorchester County, Maryland: photo by Jack Delano, July 1940

After cooking sealed cans are cooled in pool of chilled water before labeling. Phillips Packing Company, Cambridge, Maryland: photo by John Collier, August 1941

After
being filled with tomato juice and sealed, cans are carried in metal
baskets to chilled water pool for cooling. Phillips Packing Company,
Cambridge, Maryland: photo by John Collier, August 1941

Phillips Packing Company storeroom. Cambridge, Maryland: photo by John Collier, August 1941

Leif
Dahl (1908-1972), organizer of agricultural workers union, speaking at
union meeting in Bridgeton, New Jersey. Dahl, a CIO organizer for the
Fruit and Vegetable Workers Union
that later became the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and
Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA), played a central role in the ten
year effort to to organize the Phillips Packing Company. Dahl
eventually became regional
director of the union, which stood for interracial solidarity and was
one of the few
unions with a significant number of women in leadership. The union was
ultimately destroyed in the post World War II reaction against the “Red
Menace”: photo by Edwin Rosskam, 1936

Photos from Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress

The king of the food processing industries which grew up in the late 19C in the Cambridge area was Phillips Packing. It became the biggest employer in the region, securing whopping DOD contracts in both world wars -- see e.g. Phillips Packing Company WWII K Rations-- and eventually employing up to 10,000 people. Aggravated conditions and circumstances for workers led to ten years of labour agitation. In the 1937 strike a striker was run over and killed by a truck. From the time of that strike action up to 1946 there were strong efforts to unionize the plant workers, ultimately unsuccessful; the postwar Red Scare was the death knell for the CIO organization effort at Phillips. The company went out of business in the Sixties.

The 1937 Phillips strike is notable for this period in labour movement history because blacks and whites, women and men struggled shoulder-to-shoulder to bring about change.

Somewhat ironically, given what we can see here of the living conditions for Phillips' seasonal work force, marketing of products -- including the trademark brand, Phillips Delicious Tomatoes -- stressed the "Made in Dixie" angle. For instance:

I've now added a bottom photo of Leif Dahl, the union organizer who spent a decade attempting to lead the oppressed subjects of the Phillips Packing empire out of the wilderness. Futile in the end, it was.

Not that having a union is any guarantee of the Promised Land. I suppose there are unions and unions, locals and locals, etc. But my own experience in this area was not good. Over the years I paid an awful lot of useless dues to the SEIU, thinking that might help my effort to get a fair shake out of employers who were no better than a pack of grifters. When push came to shove, the union dropped me like a bad habit and the grifters vanished into the night. Next the State Labor Board fouled up the putative settlements, sending the checks to the wrong people. The wrong people of course never sent back the checks. There went my two-bit retirement.

(In this picture of course there were no Reds anywhere, merely many of the whiter shades of pink... as in embarrassed.)

Unions were rooted in the life on the shop floor. This is not the case any more; there's a class of full time pro-reps now; their decisions are often in line with a wider strategy and lousy with propriety.

What men and women like Leif Dahl risked is almost incalculable for us.